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iPod has Cool; Zune has Lame

Now that Zune has launched, the battle lines are clear.

iPod has cool.

Zune has lame.

First, check out the advertising. “Welcome to the social”… what’s this? 1950?

Then there are the geeky animations that look as if they were created by a programmer, not an artist.

Once you have got off to a bad start attracting attention, you’d better be selling something really good.

So far the reviews haven’t been great. I’ve seen user reports of installation failures, involving delving into the Windows Registry to fix them. A few details sound OK, some possibly better than an iPod. But nothing decisive.

So why is this new? Dozens of iPod rivals have appeared with the odd feature (like FM radio) thrown in, but none has come close to dethroning iPod. The WiFi sharing feature isn’t terribly compelling. Rather than allowing sharing 3 times then never, allowing sharing while playing a song but blocking copying would be a lot closer to what people want – the WiFi equivalent to passing one of your ear buds to a friend.

I can’t get excited about subscription. I can listen to as much music as I want for free through the radio. True, I don’t get to choose which to play when, but is that worth $15 per month? Anyway the idea isn’t new, and it didn’t work before. It’s what the music publishers want, not what the customer wants.

Those who see Zune as following the Windows model of being lame and barely usable up to Windows 95, then wiping out the competition are missing the key fact that Apple already dominates its market and understands its clientele in a way Microsoft can’t match. The business market bought Microsoft because it had IBM behind it, and wasn’t ready to take Apple seriously. The music market is driven by a totally different dynamic. Style, cool, a huge range of accessories, working a familiar way – yet with frequent innovation … these are things Microsoft would battle to match even without a lame launch.

Comparing Zune with Xbox needs care. It took some major errors by Sony to give Xbox 360 the edge. Playstation 3 introduced too many new technologies at once – Blu-ray and the Cell processor both needed significant hardware innovation to bring up, as well as new software. Cell also has significant disadvantages in ease of programming – around 20 new titles at time of launch is a very sorry total for a new platform with so much invested in it.

There’s another interesting turnaround: Apple being seen as a success story for Sony to emulate.

If Microsoft can overcome the initial lame launch and Apple makes a major error, this thing has some chance in a future incarnation.

But right now, it’s Apple’s game to lose, not Microsoft’s game to win.

Here’s one more big change:  the “Apple will fail” litany has died away. That was starting to get really boring. It may have been a safe bet for lazy journalists 10 years ago, when Apple was in real trouble, but since OS X, they have steadily been delivering, and the Intel switch has taken away Apple’s high cost of independent platform development, with inadequate support from their CPU vendors. It’s levelled the price-performance playing field, making Apple’s advantages in usability and reliability stronger selling points.

Back to Zune: I am not going to buy one anyway, because it lacks 2 key features I need: connectivity to a Mac, and use as an external drive. An iPod buyer doesn’t have to worry about compatibility with alternative platforms.

Funny how Apple gets a bad press for delivering closed platforms, and Microsoft doesn’t. But with all the other changes, we can wait for that to change.